Once a Foursquare Competitor, Forecast Innovates Beyond Just Check-Ins

February 28, 2012

11:30 am

0 Shares

When I covered Forecast after their beta launch last July, their position seemed precarious. The Austin-based startup was doing future check-ins: input the place and time you’ll be somewhere, then check in with one click when you arrive – features that Foursquare could easily push out to its huge user base, if it felt so inclined.

But Forecast seems to be minimizing that threat by listening to their users:

“We get thousands of feedback emails from our users and one thing that we hear consistently is how useful Forecast is for getting friends together [and] how much easier Forecast is than sending out a bunch of text messages and managing the group communication that follows. This use case is something we plan to continue optimizing for,” explains CEO René Pinnell.

To take advantage of that, Forecast has since added a “me too” button to indicate you’ll join your friends later. That creates a “forecast” for you, plus a way to keep in touch with everyone planning to meet up. So far, close to 100,000 users have been predicting their future check-ins on Forecast.

Today, the team is launching Forecast 2.0 with some new features: deep Facebook integration, gamification, and invites, including the ability to invite friends from outside the platform. To secure their place in the market, they are also building a web app and recruiting partners to use their private API.

Did you like this article?

Sorry about that. Try these articles instead!

Kira M. Newman is a Tech Cocktail writer interested in the harsh reality of entrepreneurship, work-life balance, and psychology. She is the founder of The Year of Happy and has been traveling around the world interviewing entrepreneurs in Asia, Europe, and North America since 2011. Follow her @kiramnewman or contact [email protected]